Child Poverty in Germany: Conceptual Aspects and Core Findings

Abstract

One of the main challenges facing poverty research is how to define and measure poverty and how to assess it in terms of a set of deprivation experiences. Although the concept of relative poverty measured in terms of a society’s median income or by statistics on income and living conditions may provide an essential benchmark, it is insufficient when it comes to defining contexts of precarity or consequences of poverty more closely. This methodological challenge is particularly demanding when the focus is on child poverty. Existing sociocultural and socioeconomic models of relative poverty concentrate mainly on the needs and subjective requirements of families, young adults, adults, or the aged. Even when the children’s perspectives are taken seriously, they are hardly ever linked to poverty on a conceptual level. In this article we shall focus on child poverty on the basis of the new data from the third World Vision Survey on Children in Germany from 2013. We mainly focus on the third survey but the concept and measurement of poverty and the relations to child well-being was also important in the first two surveys from 2007 to 2010. The first World Vision Survey was published in 2007, the second World Vision Survey in 2010 and the third in 2013. They were based on representative samples and qualitative interviews. In 2007, the representative part included 1,600 children aged 8–11 years. In 2010 and 2013 we expanded the sample to 2,500 children aged 6–11 years. The surveys took the form of personal oral interviews in the children’s homes. The underlying population is 6- to 11-year-old children living in Germany. The first part of the paper is explaining the framework on child well-being and the concept of poverty in the third survey and the second part offers findings from studies about child poverty in Germany and from the World Vision Children in Germany Survey with respect to the concept of family socioeconomic background.